


Dialectics of suffering fools

by gloss



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 21:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5944435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The distinguished professor indulges in a brief Dionysian break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dialectics of suffering fools

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adustyspectacle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adustyspectacle/gifts).



Walter Koenig was not a patient man. He was a brilliant man, to be sure, set to become one of the leading intellectual lights in the years to follow, but he was neither patient nor, to be perfectly honest, very nice.

He had far too much on his mind to bother with mere _niceness_.

Usually he had far too much on his mind to bother with errands as well, but a burst pipe in his department meant that classes were cancelled for the day. So after lunch at the Faculty Club (alone, over a limp Cobb salad and very forgettable gewürztraminer), Walter set out.

He regretted his decision almost immediately. The day was gloomy, nearly dark as twilight at two PM, and slush coated the narrow sidewalks and clogged the gutters, overspilling curbs and offering irresistible splashing opportunities to feckless motorists.

He trudged from the post office to the dry cleaner, the collar of his wool coat turned up and his chin tucked down. Some sort of precipitation that was neither snow nor, quite, rain, started up as he left the dry cleaner; he was empty-handed, because without a ticket, they refused to release his dress shirts. He had been unable to obtain his mail as well, having already lost the tiny key to his new box.

He was half-soaked to the skin and shivering when he made it to his final stop, the used bookstore on the outskirts of what other people colloquially referred to as Brain Town. Walter more properly called it the academic district; he prized aptness above almost all other qualities when it came to verbal style.

"Good afternoon," he said as the door rattled shut behind him. It was much warmer inside the shop.

His glasses were fogging slowly while rain ran off his hair, down his cheeks and the back of his neck. Another day or so of this weather, and he'd be a prime candidate for walking pneumonia.

As well as being warmer, the shop was also darker. The narrow entrance was dominated by a platform to his left that held the clerk and his cash register. The two were dwarfed by the overstuffed shelves below the high counter as well as behind it. Ahead of him, the store itself stretched backward in three aisles overtopped by yet more shelves. 

The shelves seemed to tip together overhead, meeting just out of sight, like trees in a wood.

Walter smiled, thinking of Athena's τέμενος ( _temenos_ , sacred site), the αλσος ( _alsos_ ) grove of olive trees that became the site for the Platonic Academe. Such sites were both bounded and open, sacred and natural, dialectically producing sanctity while reminding the worshiper of his innate mortality.

Pleased by this whimsical tumble of insights and references, Walter didn't realize at first that he was being studiously ignored.

The clerk sat perched on the high, rickety stool behind the register, face downturned to gaze at something in his lap. No doubt some kind of electronic fetish object.

"Excuse me?" Walter asked.

He didn't think it too much to expect a reply to his greeting, possibly even an offer of a towel or napkin.

The creature behind the counter exhibited precisely the sort of degenerate lassitude that Walter disliked so much in his students. Every movement was performed reluctantly, so slowly as to inspire instant frustration. _So sorry to disturb you,_ Walter always found himself thinking in a sarcastic snarl, _how very rude of me to request that you. Do. Your. Job._

Depending on how surly the person turned out to be, frequently Walter spoke those very words, too.

He was not an autocrat, not an old-fashioned relic from a better age, nor "arrogant to the point of satire", as one recent teaching evaluation had put it, but Walter did expect the bare minimum from people: eye contact, civility, a few complete sentences.

What he usually got were: hooded sleepy stares, sullen monotones, garbled mumblings.

Despite the lowest possible expectations, everyone around him conspired to frustrate and disappoint even those. 

"I'm here to pick up —" Walter broke off when the boy waved his hand at him. Without even glancing up, he held up one finger, then pointed it at Walter.

"Excuse —"

"Shush," the boy said, actually speaking the word rather than performing the onomatopoeia it usually denoted. "One sec."

"No doubt you're absorbed in various online activities on your cellular phone," Walter said, grasping the edge of the counter, "trading 'dick pics' as it were or losing vast sums of your parents' money in offshore casinos, but I --"

Despite his indolence, he was a goodlooking young man, all things considered: lanky, in need of a shave and a haircut to be sure, but Walter saw far worse specimens every day in class and the halls.

"Dick pics, huh?" The boy laughed at him. He set down a floppy magazine on the counter. "You're here to pick up the Weigert first edition you ordered."

On the cover of the magazine — a comic book, Walter noted, correcting himself — a bulky muscled man in what seemed to be trying to be Ancient Spartan fighting gear grappled with an even larger humanoid creature, this one with green skin. _The Incredible Hercules_ , screamed the blocky title. _Smash of the Titans!_

Walter, absorbed in studying the cover, nodded without fully listening. When the information did penetrate his consciousness, he looked up, startled.

"I know you, Dr. Koenig, yeah," the boy continued. He dropped out of sight, evidently rummaging in the shelves behind the counter. "Here you go." He rose back into view, dust smudging his nose. With one hand, he handed the slim volume to Walter as he brushed the overlong hair out of his eyes with the other.

"You don't remember me," he continued, lifting himself back onto the high stool at the register.

Walter did not have much of a memory for faces, it was true. He just saw so many — the administration kept his teaching load nearly unbearable — and he ordinarily had so much on his mind that he didn't bother trying very hard to recall.

"I'm sorry," he said as the boy waited for him.

"No, you're not," he replied, smiling faintly. It was a slightly crooked expression, no teeth, and he tilted his head as he looked Walter over. "But that's okay."

The air in here had shifted now, from welcomingly warm to just this side of stultifying.

"Should I remember you?"

He shrugged, lifting just one shoulder. "Probably not, no."

Walter considered the contradiction. On one hand, the lad expected to be recognized, yet did not seem to believe he deserved it. "What's your name?"

He had twisted in his seat and was leaning over, half out of sight, so his voice was muffled. "Ian," he said, or at least that was what Walter heard. The surname was lost to the ages.

Ian's sweater was riding up as he fumbled for something, exposing an ever-broadening expanse of skin on his lower back. The sweater itself was wool, dark heathered green overrun by pills large and small; Walter's fingers itched to pluck them off, one by one.

Perhaps his fingers itched for other reasons. He was staring at the delicate skin there, how it hollowed down below the waistband of Ian's corduroy trousers, into that uncharted, _unchartable,_ zone that was neither back nor buttock.

Grasping the edge of one shelf, Ian hauled himself back up, twisting back to face Walter.

"Come back here," he said, offering a soft chamois cloth to Walter.

"Why should I?"

Ian slumped a little, shrugging again. "You look half-drowned, Dr. Koenig."

"Oh. Well, yes." Walter deposited his satchel on the floor and pulled off his coat, hanging it on a hook just to the left of the platform. "Will you let me in?"

The step was barred with a low door, knee-high. 

Ian rolled his eyes. "It's not locked. Just push through."

"That seems insecure and potentially dangerous," Walter commented as he stepped up onto the platform.

It should have been claustrophobic up there, surrounded on four sides by shelves, what little free floor space there was crowded with cartons of more books. Instead, it seemed, frankly, cozy.

"Uh-huh, we're constantly under attack for the vast sums of money here," Ian said.

Walter rather suspected he was being sarcastic. Rather than engage, he reached for the cloth in Ian's hands. At the same time, Ian leaned forward. He meant to hand the cloth over, Walter realized belatedly, but before that, it looked like he wanted to wipe Walter's face for him.

So Walter leaned towards the boy, closing his eyes and pushing his glasses up onto the crown of his head.

It was silent, then, for a beat or two too long, before Walter realized his mistake.

But it was too late for him to pull away, because Ian sighed, a little, and touched the side of Walter's neck with bare fingers. Then his jaw, then his cheek, until his palm was pressed against Walter's face from temple to throat.

Walter knew all too well that the Latin roots for the skull's temple ( _tempus_ , time) and the site of worship (templum) were different. There was no link other than sound between the two, yet it was tempting to consider that region of the skull as a site for thought, for the emergence of knowledge, the irruptive birth of the goddess Athena.

In other words, the coincidence was pleasing, and Walter smiled even as they kissed, as somehow he shuffled forward and Ian gathered him in with warm, sure hands.

The cloth was dropped, possibly caught between them. Forgotten.

Ian kissed with more energy than he had shown to that point. His mouth was slick, his tongue probing and elusive, and he resisted every little move and tilt that Walter tried in order to regain control. 

The warmth of touch and kiss, the sheer physical delight of it, rolled through Walter like something both syrupy and fizzing. The tide loosened his posture, made him tilt back his head and grab at Ian's sweater to haul him closer, in, over.

He abandoned any effort at control and settled into pleasure, a Dionysian compromise that he'd never yet come to regret. Moments of pleasure, intoxication, being transported back into the hot, mobile skin of your own animal body: they could not, should never, be resisted, not even in the life of the mind.

Ian closed his knees against Walter's thighs, trapping him there, and groaned into the sloppy kiss when Walter shoved his hand between them, into Ian's lap, palm grazing the unmistakable heat of his growing erection.

In the dark tangle of thought and need surging through him, Walter saw the naked bodies of young Athenians padding through the olive grove on their way to citizenship, to the full life of democratic participation and glory. He closed his fingers over Ian's erection as best he could and crushed himself into the kiss, into the tug of Ian's hand in his hair, the slip of their tongues together.

"Wait," Ian said into the kiss, so it came out garbled. He tried to pull away but Walter craned forward to close the distance. "Wait —"

Without releasing his grip on Walter's hair, he wormed his free hand beneath Walter's and tugged down his zipper. He paused, grunted, when Walter laced their fingers together to reach into his fly.

"Christ," Ian breathed, resuming the kiss, disentangling his fingers, and thrusting up into Walter's grasp. "Fuck it, okay."

Walter's balance wavered, gravity seesawing through him, when he got his hand around Ian's penis. He grabbed the edge of a shelf with his other hand, the spines of books raking his knuckles, and jerked Ian roughly, listening to him coo and grunt and curl into Walter with increasing needy desperation. Their kiss slid apart then crashed back together as Walter sped up, following the rabbity-thrust of Ian's hips, feeling the pre-cum spill over his hand.

This was glorious, this moment, _knowing everything_ , exactly how to make the boy yelp and gurgle and cling to him, how to tug the pleasure out of him by the root, again and again until he was yanking on Walter's hair and ejaculating in several spattery bursts.

He was beautiful. Then, of course — no one is ugly post-coitus, everyone is radiant in their own way — but also beyond this moment. He was a beautiful man, hooded eyes and sarcastic smile and the rough discomfort of his stubble.

Walter contemplated him as Ian pulled back a little, tucking himself in, doing up his fly.

Walter waited until he had Ian's attention again, then very carefully licked his hand and wrist clean of the sour, rapidly-cooling ejaculate.

"Fuck," Ian said.

Walter nodded, then daubed at the corners of his mouth. Control regained, and he felt entirely serene and quite pleased with himself.

"I can, like —" Ian gestured vaguely to Walter's midsection. "I'd like to."

Walter considered the offer. He had no doubt that Ian knew what he was doing; he seemed a very competent lad. But the moment for Dionysian abandonment was past, growing fainter with each heartbeat.

He told Ian as much, not without expressing his gratitude, of course, and finished by adding, "sometimes greater pleasure comes in the contradictions, in denying the obvious pleasure. A sort of dialectic, if you will."

"Aw, Walter, you're breaking my heart," Ian murmured, leaning back, dropping his head back and taking deep breaths that pushed his chest upward. "God."

"I fail to see how."

"Of course you do." The flush of orgasm was fading from his face, but the brightness in his eyes remained. "Never mind."

"Another time, perhaps?" Walter felt, rather than heard, hope and need carve the statement into a question, an uncertainty. He bit his lip.

"Yeah, man. Any time." Ian handed him the Weigert and took his cash. Walter considered advising him to keep the change, but caught himself when he realized that might just literalize the rather alluring (but ethically appalling) metaphor of sacred prostitution that was running through his mind.

"You know there are, like. Places online where you can order your books, right?" Ian asked, handing back the change. "That's all we do. Just mark it up for you."

"That's fine," Walter said as he stepped down off the platform and pulled on his overcoat. "I generally don't have the time for such distractions."

"No dick pics for you, got it." 

Walter stowed the book in his satchel and said, as he straightened up and opened the door, "No, those would be welcome."

Outside, the sleet had let up and Walter welcomed the brisk cold on his flushed face. He had a lot of reading to do.


End file.
